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... make the submission of a vote IDENTICAL for everyone: means pen and paper. Paper ballots go into a sealed envelope that gets dropped into a sealed and uniquely identified ballot box that is brought to the counting place. The opening of the ballot boxes as well as the counting has to be open to the public, same as it should be to allow the public to observe voting at polling places as long as that does not interfere with the voting process (5 witnesses is OK, 500 probably not). That is the only way for the public to organize voting control by tallying the votes cast and comparing them to the votes counted. It would eliminate stuffing the ballot boxes or exchanging them during transport or having special interests rig the final tallies.

That is almost exactly the way that voting works in the UK. Anyone can go and observe a count, and verify that the seals on the ballot boxes haven't been tampered with before they are opened.

Privacy Guard is enabled for all apps by default. The first time an app requests a permission, the user is asked to allow/disallow that permission, and can choose whether to have that choice remembered or be asked every time. Disallowed permissions simply present the app with false data. Apps work fine, they just think you have no friends/live in the middle of the Atlantic/never connect to WiFi etc etc.

This. I can't understand how black box software+hardware voting sytems can be considered in any way superior to a bit of paper, a pencil, a sealed ballot box and a lot of volunteers counting votes in the open on the table on a village hall or council office.

Yep. Nobody is forcing you at gunpoint to use a systemd based distro. You can always roll your own. THe software is free and out there. Nobody is going to take the source code for SysV init from you. You have complete and utter freedom to use whatever software you want. Just don't expect your favourite distro to bend over backwards just to please you.

It doesn't matter how many injuries come from things that are nothing to do with guns. If gun ownership were more tightly controlled, those 14000-19000 nonfatal injuries and the hundreds of fatal injuries from accidental shootings would be reduced by at least an order of magnitude - lives would be saved. You might as well say that, as deaths due to Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma are around 18000 a year in the USA, then it is not worth attempting to find cures for this disease as so many other things are likely to kill you.

Here in the civilised world, where gun worship of the kind practised in the USA is considered an aberration, murder rates and prison populations are proportionally tiny compared to the USA. Honestly, most developed countries think you are all nuts.

The sarcasm fails because everyone has heard of mines or other remote projects where private enterprise builds 100% of their infrastructure...

...and often externalises much of the cost onto the public - in the case of mines, often by allowing toxic leachates into river systems, building spoil tips in unsafe places, etc. The list of mining-related human and environmental disasters is long, and the majority of incidents were ultimately caused by the profit-seeking private owners of the mines wishing to reduce their cost burden.

Funnily enough, in the UK at least, the people most reliant on welfare are those most likely to support government attempts to cut welfare entitlements, even though they themselves are likely to suffer due to those policies. This seems to be a result of the constant demonisation of welfare recipients in the newspapers most likely to be read in lower-income households.

Owen Jones is particularly good on this.

Some reasons that the modern welfare state keeps growing:- People keep having children- Cuts in state funding of social investment programmes (such as parenting education initiatives, adult education classes, social housing construction etc) reduce the chances of people in the lowest income brackets from being able to find work that will lift them out of poverty
- The national minimum wage (in the UK) is less than the living wage, so work in many cases does not pay

Global warming won't result in near-extinction for humans. It will make life a lot less pleasant though, and will probably prove fatal to many in less-resilient (ie poorer) areas as food crops fail and prices rise. There will almost certainly be wars fought over access to water. Current global population levels will become unsustainable.

Some animal and plant species will certainly become extinct as habitats shrink, and ocean acidification will really hit a lot of food chains that we consider important (bye bye cheap protein from fish, already vulnerable due to overexploitation).

But you and me? We're part of the global elite, with the luxury of having the time and money to be posting on this site rather than scratching a living from subsistence farming. We'll pay higher prices for our food, and grumble about all the floods and tornadoes pushing up insurance premiums, but we're unlikely to die from starvation or war as a result of climate change.